Tech

Google Chrome Can Now Talk Back to You

You can now talk to your computer, kind of like you would a person — that is, if you're running Google's Chrome browser. The conversational search abilities that Google showed off last week at its I/O developer conference are now live.

Although Chrome's voice search, which allows users to search for things just by speaking, has been around for a while, the update now lets your computer speak back to you. For example, if you asked, "Who is the prime minister of Canada?", Chrome will say out loud, "The prime minister of Canada is Stephen Harper."

In theory, conversational search also lets you ask natural-language follow-up questions to Chrome such as, "Where does he live?" or "What year did he take office?" (Note the pronouns.) Chrome should respond with those answers verbally, assuming your computer's microphone is working properly.

In practice, though, it's not nearly this seamless. I tried out Google's conversational search at the I/O conference, and Chrome is a lousy conversationalist. Even when it heard my follow-ups correctly, it typically spat back a list of links.

The same is true today. When I tried asking some simple follow-up questions to basic queries about world figures and locations, Chrome very rarely responded verbally at all. Only when I retreated to a super-easy question chain — "Who is Barack Obama?" and "How tall is he?" — did Chrome speak back to me for the second question.

However, for single-question searches that have clear right answers, conversational search works pretty well. When asked, "What's the atomic mass of plutonium?", Google can tell you it's 244u in a soothing female voice. Although you can turn off voice replies in Google settings, there doesn't seem to be a way to change the sound of the voice. The feature also only works in English for now.

Have you tried Chrome conversational search? How do you like it? Let us know in the comments.

BONUS: Best Chrome Extensions for Design

10 Chrome Extensions for Designers

What if the first tab in your browser every morning was a healthy shot of inspiration? Benchwarmer is a neat extension for Chrome that replaces the "New Tab" screen with six shots from Dribbble. Dribbble is an invite-only, high-quality community of designers who share what they are currently working on, in the high altar of pixel-perfection.

Once installed Benchwarmer defaults to the latest top-rated shots; however, you can customize this view using the gear symbol. Hovering over a shot shows its number of likes and who posted it. You also can enter your own Dribbble username to display the work of users you follow.

When ColorZilla launched for Firefox over seven years ago, it was one of the first browser-based color pickers available. This official port for Chrome proves equally useful and includes a color picker, eye dropper and gradient generator, along with additional advanced color tools. You can get a color reading from any point in the browser (and save these colors in custom palettes), make edits on the fly and paste the output (in CSS, Hex, RGB and more) into other apps.

The ability to analyze DOM elements on a webpage and inspect its palette of colors is a particularly valuable feature. You can also pick colors from Flash Objects at any zoom level, and generated or sampled colors automatically copy to the clipboard.

The days of right-clicking to "view source" are long over. WhatFont identifies all the fonts used on a webpage and gives in-depth details, such as the font family, font size, along with the color, weight and line height (you can even tweet this information). Apart from native web safe fonts, it detects the services used for serving the font and supports Typekit and Google Web Fonts.

It gives you the fall-back string, and if a font called for is not installed, it's striked-through, showing the actual font used. It's important to remember it only works for online pages, not locally. Once activated, hover on text and a pop-up displays all the selected fonts information.

An official Google extension, Screen Capture quickly captures visible objects, whole pages, visible sections of pages and drawn selections as PNG files. Each snapshot can be edited and annotated (before being saved), and highlighting, lines, arrows and redacting and adding text are fully supported. It intelligently detects floating objects on a page to avoid repeating the capture of the same objects if the whole page requires scrolling.

It works quickly, even when capturing large pages, and will also scroll the page horizontally if necessary. Share the snapshots on Picasa, Facebook and Imgur for instant collaboration.

Also of note is Awesome Screenshot, which boasts a rich feature list for capturing and annotating webpages.

When we spend most of our time using a web browser, storing and cataloging information effortlessly becomes essential. The Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome makes it quick and easy to store just about anything you find on the web in your Evernote account, including selected text, articles, links, PDF's, images and even entire webpages. Tag each snapshot when saving and select an Evernote notebook in which you'll store the snapshot. The "intelligent," context-aware functionality is impressive, with the pre-selection of notebooks (and tags) based on website content.

There is virtually no limit to the ways in which you use it; for example, you could collect inspiration for a particular design project you are working on, and have access to it whenever you need, even if the original is removed.

Pixlr Editor is a fully featured photo editor available directly in your browser. Sharing interface similarities to Adobe Photoshop, the learning curve is low and it boasts a wealth of capabilities you would only normally find in a desktop application. The fast, intuitive, thoughtfully organized interface means quick edits are a breeze. It includes editing, filters and adjustment tools and even opens PSD files.

Accomplish image editing entirely in the cloud using Pixlr Editor -- open images from Facebook, Picasa or Flickr, edit them and then save back to the cloud.

With MeasureIt, draw out a ruler which shows the alignment and exact pixel width and height dimensions of any selected element on a webpage, an especially useful tool when designing and developing websites. To use the extension, just click and drag out the ruler to find an element's dimensions quickly and easily.

While not as feature-rich as its Firefox counterpart, it is especially useful when tweaking CSS, where accuracy down to the last pixel is necessary. MeasureIt works on local installs of most CMS's but does not work on local HTML files.

Colors play an important role in design, and it can be challenging to create the "perfect" palette. Having an extension such as Palette at easy reach within your browser can make this particular task much more efficient.

Palette for Chrome can create up to 64 color palettes and is useful for grabbing ideas and inspiration for color palettes from images around the web. The interface is intuitive and easy to use; simply right-click on the desired image, select "Palette for Chrome," and choose the number of colors you want the palette to generate. A new tab will open, displaying the image and resulting color palette.

The extension was recently updated to fix several bugs, and the code is now open-source and available on Git Hub.

When testing content or typography, dummy text can be useful. For those who don't use alternatives, try Yet Another Lorem Ipsum Generator. It will generate text (paragraphs of variable length), titles, dates and dummy email and web addressees, with other options available via the toolbar button. You can configure the date format and choose specific dates or generate a random date.

Copy text to the clipboard for use in other apps; the extension itself is extremely lightweight as it doesn't include any external libraries or require access to other online resources.

Pendule complements the built-in developer tools of Chrome and makes website edits easy, such as viewing CSS, disabling styles, reloading CSS (without having to reload the entire webpage), viewing JavaScript and much more. The extension itself is unobtrusive, quick and responsive, featuring an extensive toolset. The the ability to switch off both images and CSS is particularly useful when designing and developing websites.

There is also a color picker, display ruler, link checker and several script validators, with each feature neatly arranged into groups. The option to change the display resolution, for checking how your website renders on multiple screen resolutions, is neat, and you can even set keyboard shortcuts for the extension from the Options menu.

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